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Comment by samuelstros | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Local-first is further commoditizing software.

Users will refrain from paying a subscription if their app version works and they don't need updates. The good old buy-a-license with 1 year of updates will likely make a big comeback. Local-first software, at least in lix universe [0], does not have fixed recurring maintenance costs like running servers. The elimination of fixed recurring maintenance costs will lead to a proliferation of "hobby apps" that are undercut by price/make it free altogether.

[0] https://github.com/opral/monorepo/blob/main/lix/README.md

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Which is wonderful for users that want that and are savvy enough to understand the limitations! However, hobby apps will not be able to afford designers or support or long-lived servers. As long as the social contract is clear, it's a net win. The issue comes when end-users expect the same level of support and continued updates from hobbyists as they got from commercialized apps. Spoiler alert: They absolutely do, at least in B2C. (Or in this case, H2C?)

> The issue comes when end-users expect the same level of support and continued updates from hobbyists as they got from commercialized apps.

Maybe. Doesn't change the fact that software will be more commoditized.

If software switching costs get close to 0 [because data is owned and can be opened by any other app], pricing pressure will get intense. Investors love cloud SaaS because they can rent-seek and extract margins of >80%. It's unlikely that apps that do not own and lock-in customer data can rent-seek to such a degree. If they do that, users will switch to the next best solution.

The product is not just the program. People don't just care about function, they care about how the app makes them feel, how it affects how they think others perceive them, etc. -- the companies that can afford to market and make their experiences sexy will run laps around purely functional apps that can't, no matter how well they solve the problem (unfortunately). Good marketers and designers do not have the same proclivities towards working for free as developers do.

The hope is that the markets are large enough that niche apps can carve out a healthy revenue with a more personal, "homegrown" experience. This is where my product lives, and so far it's worked well enough.

Also, switching cost is never zero or even close to it. The user still has to click a button. I know it sounds like I'm being facetious, but coming from a large-scale B2C industry, a single button click is an enormous obstacle.

For most use cases the solution should be evident further down the road. Overwhelming majority of why a server is needed is data sync between clients. Self-hosting should have it's moment where a simple user-maintainable server solution emerges. Then you could just offer a plugin to that platform - a bit like how Synology works already.

I've mostly been cloud free this way. I do send (sometimes encrypted) backups/copies elsewhere, but those are exceptions. And it works well across many client devices (and remote via DNS/forwarding).

But the reality is that there’s plenty of hobby app businesses that do the one time sale revenue model.

The internet is rife with stories of hobbyists who would love to give adobe $500 to just buy their software outright. Many Adobe competitors offer exactly this!

> However, hobby apps will not be able to afford designers or support or long-lived servers.

It's not like many professional services manage the long-lived part, either, is it?

I have much more confidence in my WebDAV server still being around in a decade than pretty much any cloud-based service.

What exactly do you mean by “hobby apps?” I’m slightly confused because it is pretty common to describe open source projects and the like as hobbyist programming, with all the expectations of customer service (specifically, none) that that entails.

If somebody is taking money for something, it isn’t really a hobby, it is a job. It might be a poorly paid one, but they still have an ethical obligation to their customers, to meet some standards of merchantability and provide some level of customer service.

But if you mean, “apps that hobbyists use” then that makes more sense. There’s nothing wrong with producing a toolkit that a hobbyist can use to write their own apps of course. It is like producing hand tools—you have an ethical obligation to make sure the tools themselves are reasonably free of defects but of course you don’t have to provide customer support for the treehouse!

I refer to open source projects, indie hackers, and one man shows with "hobby apps."

Distribution (specifically maintenance) becoming cheaper will enable those people to compete/provide enough value to customers that larger companies face downward pricing challenges.

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